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Looney Tunes
"Praise and Worship Theology" is goofy
by Michael Spencer

...Yes, the iMonk said: Evangelicals can't stop turning methodology into theology. It's astonishingly simple, and frighteningly common.

Do something. Roll over. Sit up and beg. Start using Powerpoint. Set up an idol of Baal in the parlor. Marry Larry King. Anything.

If it works, then an appropriate theology will be quickly supplied. Methodology, i.e. what we choose to do, if it works, becomes theology, i.e. what we believe about God, and what we believe God has endorsed.

Take the public invitation as an example (a subject I may have exhausted in three IM pieces this year.) Baptists started telling people to walk the aisle if they were responding to God. People walked. Within a year, theologians published the well known book, Everything God Has To Say About the Invitation. Here's a quote.

"We now know that the Holy Spirit is pleading with you to walk the aisle. We know that if you hold on to that pew, you are resisting the Holy Spirit. We know that whatever goes on down front is the work of the Holy Spirit. We know that the Bible is talking about invitations in Southern Baptist Churches when it says "Take up your cross and follow me." We didn't know any of this stuff UNTIL we figured out what worked. Then God opened up our heads and poured that theology right in there."

Understand this, and you may understand more than you want to know about evangelicals. Increasingly, the only theology that matters is the kind we cook up to justify whatever circus we are trying next....

...Advocates of ["Praise and Worship" music] have lost the capacity to realize that Christian music companies will say anything to sell product. Once a couple of thousand units are moved, then "God is all over it," and the artists, producers, musicians and girls working at the checkouts are all anointed by God with a special anointing.

This cynical use of a powerful Biblical concept to sell CDs is number one on my list of stupid things said by Christian worship leaders. I don't want to be insulted by being told I have to like the next tune because God gave the lyrics in a dream or manipulated by testimonies of how this song has been anointed for the salvation of teenagers from broken homes....